Currently, traffic of a telecom backbone network is growing rapidly by 50% to 80% each year. Since early 2011, the 802.3 working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (institute of electrical and electronics engineers, IEEE) started to collect bandwidth development demands after a 100 gigabit Ethernet (gigabit ethernet, GE for short) standard was published. It is estimated that network traffic in 2015 may be 10 times as much as that in 2010. In the future, there may be two types of Ethernet interfaces: 400 GE and 1 terabit Ethernet (terabit Ethernet, TE for short). The foregoing two types of Ethernet interfaces may be widely applied in 2015 and 2020.
A rate of an existing router is generally 200 G, 480 G, or 1 Tbps. However, on a physical subboard, Ethernet interfaces of different rates are generally implemented by using different hardware designs. An existing problem is that there are many types of physical subboards and different Ethernet interface chips need to be designed for different types of subboards, which consequently causes problems of a heavy workload and an increased cost resulting from many types of chips. A network device supplier needs to prepare multiples types of boards, which may multiply an investment.
In the prior art, a 100 GE interface is implemented according to the IEEE 802.3ba standard; and by using a single port or the Internet Protocol (internet protocol, IP for short), a Media Access Control (media access control) protocol layer interface in the prior art is generally implemented by binding multiple ports to obtain a trunk (trunk) interface. The router is externally presented as a fixed-rate Media Access Control protocol layer interface. To vividly describe a structure of an existing Medium Access Control protocol layer interface implemented by using a single port, the existing fixed-rate single-port Medium Access Control protocol layer interface may be represented in a form of a channel (channel), as shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a Medium Access Control protocol layer interface that is of an existing router and is implemented by using a single port in the prior art. The interface is a large channel from top to bottom, and the channel may process a data stream of a fixed-rate Medium Access Control protocol layer. In addition, interconnection and interworking with a peer device can be implemented only by using the fixed-rate Medium Access Control protocol layer interface.
An existing fixed-rate single-port Ethernet interface can hardly meet a requirement for complex bandwidth configuration, and has a limited application scenario.